Version control of Mathematica notebooks

Question

Mathematica notebooks are, of course, plaintext files -- it seems reasonable to expect that they should play nice with a version-control system (git in my case, although I doubt the specific system matters). But the fact is that any .nb file is full of cache information, timestamps, and other assorted metadata. Scads of it.

Which means that limited version control is possible -- commits and rollbacks work fine. Merging, though, is a disaster. Mathematica won't open a file with merge markers in it, and a text editor is no way to go through a .nb file.

Has anyone had any luck putting a notebook under version control? How?

Answer 1

You should only get merge markers if the source control system detects changes to a single line by multiple users.

The source control system adds markers to make if very clear where the conflicts are, and to force you to manually remove them (as you resolve each conflict). There is no way for a source control system to know how to do it automatically for you.

If the file is text, but is designed to be read by a program only, it may have no end of line characters at all (or very long lines). Therefore if multiple people are working on such a file you'll get many merge conflicts.

I'm not familiar with the nb file format, but in general the solution to this problem is to ensure only one person is working on a file at a time (ie use an exclusive check-out mode for nb files).

Answer 2

Not a solution to your merging problem exactly, but this is how we handle notebooks and source control in my team. Basically, we treat Mathematica notebooks the way we'd treat binary files. They're checked-in, but:

• we always keep a pdf copy alongside the .nb (backup for restoring the information in case we lose, for some reason, the capability of readings .nb files. Still proprietary format, but a bit more widespread, and chances are both Adobe and Wolfram won't simultaneously disappear)
• we do not allow merges
• we code-review only the final product (the rendered notebook) instead of the .nb file.

We mostly use Mathematica for small proofs, explorations and sidetracks, so the above procedure works fine for us (our main documentation is in LaTeX, which produces friendlier documentation for non-mathematicians/non-programmers)